Color Mixing for Kids HD by Applicable2U
Tuesday, April 26, 2011 at 8:12AM 
Color Mix for Kids HD
By Eightfold Education
As a child, whether you had a box of Crayola crayons or some other generic brand, the thought of blending colors to create something new would intrigue just about anyone. Now with the help of an educational app called Color Mix for Kids HD, technology and creativity will come together in one simple download. With only a painters palette for mixing, multiple types of canvases, a sponge and four primary colors, early elementary students will feel like an artist. Color Mix for Kids HD is not only fun to explore, but it also meets a number of academic requirements beginning at first through fourth grade.
With a very clean design as you navigate from page to page, users will quickly understand through visual clues or buttons what choices they have that will encourage or develop their artistic side. This educational app is suitable for both home and school use. To begin creating, simply tap the painters palette. Here users are given the four primary colors: red, green, yellow and blue. The primary color toolbar is referred to as the mixing bar. Immediately users can begin creating a master piece on the right hand side. To set themselves apart from other art applications, Eightfold Education has added the ability to have multiple fingers drawing at one time. A note to the developers – is it possible to have users each choosing their own color as they create at the same time? This would encourage and build the life skill of working together and collaborating. In addition, by selecting the paint palette button, users can explore and discover new colors. Through this discovery, users should recall various art terms learned such as: primary and secondary colors, warm and cool colors, analogous and complementary, or the color wheel depending on the grade level of the user. With very realistic paint blobs, budding arts can click on a color and drop it onto the mixing bar. If you want to remove or start a new color, simply tap the sponge to clean one or more of the mixing bar colors. Once the color exploration is complete, click the green checkmark to continue drawing. As pictures are completed, the user has the option to save their picture to the gallery, empty it into the trash can or to fix any mistakes. Free draw and this idea of color mixing provides an educator another way to assess their students understanding of key arts benchmarks in a less stressful way.
Free exploration is not the only option that a user has within Color Mixing for Kids. For those not yet in school and those that are in school, they also have the ability to color in a variety of animal coloring pages and environmental science lesson connect the dot pages. A cross curricular application that also reinforces fine motor skills is definite bonus! Each can be saved to the applications gallery or to your photo album on your iPad device. If desired, these pages can then be emailed, printed, assigned to a contact, turned into your wallpaper or copied. In addition, users can choose from 32 different backgrounds to extend their free drawing experience. A note to the developer – might it be possible to choose different sized paint brushes as children are manipulating the coloring and dot to dot pages. With this incorporated additional art standards would be mastered.
Overall, Applicable2U gives Color Mix for Kids HD a thumbs up! It provides the user an educational, interactive, and fun experience. If you like what you see now on this version, just wait until you see some of the upcoming updates. To learn more about Eightfold Education, please visit their website here. To encourage learners in a variety of ways, begin downloading Color Mix for Kids HD as a way to bring out the artist inside of them.
Reviewers website: www.applicable2u.wordpress.com
Art, Drawing, creative | in Early Elementary, Kindergarten, Toddler 
Recommendation: I swore my first review for IEAR would not be a game. However as I looked at apps for potential review this month, I kept coming back to Depict. If you are familiar with Pictionary, then you will understand Depict. When you launch Depict you can choose to play a Quick Match or with Play with Friends (which I will get back to in a minute). In an education setting, I would avoid the Quick Match as that throws you into a game with a variety of people that you have no control over.